How does Tencent intend to play its strongest card in the Agent era?

Fast Reading

• Over the past two decades, Tencent has connected billions of people, and now it aims to connect the scattered tools, systems and data within enterprises.
• However, what Tencent really strives for in the Agent era may not be the next WeChat, but a position at the operating system level.
• Connection is a card Tencent has held for many years. In the Agent era, it finally gets the chance to play this card in a deeper, more challenging and more worthwhile tough battle.

Over the past two decades, if a person wanted to use internet services, they usually needed to find the corresponding entry first.

You open QQ or WeChat for chatting, open e-commerce platforms for shopping, enter travel apps for ticket booking, and switch back and forth between emails, documents, meetings and various enterprise software to handle work. Internet companies build business models around these entries, and compete for users, traffic and ecosystems around entries.

Agents are changing this set of rules.

When an agent can understand human intentions, call different software and complete tasks across system boundaries, users no longer need to remember so many entries. Software still exists, but they may no longer directly face users, instead becoming the tools and capabilities behind the Agent.

The change of entries means the change of connection relations.

From QQ to WeChat, Tencent has twice seized the connection opportunities brought by technological changes. Now, as Agents begin to enter the real business processes of enterprises, the connection business that Tencent has long been good at is facing a new test: can it extend its ability to connect people to the ability to connect people with production systems?

This time, Tencent tries to put the answer on WorkBuddy.

Since its launch in March this year, WorkBuddy has cumulatively completed 9 billion task requests in more than 7 months, and its enterprise version covers 50% of China's top 500 enterprises.

"Every round of technological change will bring a round of ecological reconstruction," said Li Qiang, Vice President of Tencent Group and President of Tencent Cloud and Industry Solutions, at the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit not long ago.

At the Ecosystem Summit, Tencent further released Buddy One, which takes WorkBuddy as the workbench.

Inwardly, it integrates Tencent Docs, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Cloud Drive and IMA, unifies accounts, point pools and data pools, and integrates Tencent's office ecosystem; outwardly, it connects the existing systems of enterprises, third-party Agents and mainstream models.

Tencent is trying to redeploy the connection capabilities it accumulated in the consumer internet era to the core of enterprise productivity.

However, what Tencent really strives for in the Agent era may not be the next WeChat, but a position at the operating system level.

WeChat is the interface between people and the digital world in the mobile internet era, while WorkBuddy aims to become the interface between Agents and the enterprise digital world.

The two have different product forms, user groups and business models, but they share the same strategic logic behind them:

The one that becomes the center of connection gets the chance to participate in defining the rules of the ecosystem.

The biggest problem is not that the model is not powerful enough

At the Ecosystem Summit, Wang Huixing, Vice President of Tencent Group and CTO of Tencent Cloud, told a story:

Before introducing the enterprise version, a global manufacturing enterprise already had thousands of employees using WorkBuddy spontaneously. The day after the enterprise version was launched, more than 2,000 test accounts were snapped up by employees. After the large-scale full-staff promotion was launched, the number of AI users in the enterprise increased by more than 10 times.

The original intention of Wang Huixing to tell this story is to emphasize the advantages of the enterprise version of WorkBuddy in security governance: the iOA zero-trust security management system, which started within Tencent in 2016, has been deployed on more than 10 million devices after being commercialized externally in 2020. The end-to-cloud Agent full-link security framework can avoid the risk of information leakage that may be caused by the flow of enterprise data to personal terminals.

But this story also confirms from the side that AI implementation is not a top-down project like traditional SaaS, but a process that advances both top-down and bottom-up.

Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Cloud and Smart Industries Group, described the situation of enterprises in the market competition in the AI era as "moving forward or falling behind".

A question also arises: how can individual efficiency improvement be transformed into quantifiable organizational productivity improvement?

This is also the question that Wang Huixing has been repeatedly asked by a large number of customers since the launch of the enterprise version of WorkBuddy. He splits this problem into four barriers that enterprises must cross, and gives four evaluation criteria: operable, trustworthy, measurable, and easy to implement.

Among them, "trustworthy" points to security governance, ensuring that the identity, permissions and behaviors of Agents are controllable and the process is traceable; "measurable" relies on the "observability center" to let enterprises see where Tokens are used, which departments and scenarios the money is spent on, and which step of the task is slow or costly; the solution for "easy to implement" is to realize the rapid replication of organizational experience through digital employees and the WorkBuddy Managed Agents (WMA) platform.

But the most critical step is "operable", which determines whether Agents can actually work in the real business processes of enterprises.

Tang Daosheng judges that the biggest problem for enterprises to implement Agents currently is not that the model is not powerful enough, but that there are too many breakpoints; the key to Agent implementation is connection, so that large models can understand business context and truly enter the work process.

Over the past two decades, Tencent has connected billions of people, and now it aims to connect the scattered tools, systems and data within enterprises.

The system construction of large enterprises spans decades, with different interfaces, permissions and calibers. ERP, CRM, OA, finance, human resources and knowledge bases often operate independently. Connecting these breakpoints one by one is a tough job. But once connected, it is equivalent to building a connection hub for the enterprise.

The one that achieves this will have the deepest moat in the Agent era.

Closure cannot lock traffic

Placing itself at the position of the connection base means maintaining an open attitude.

Tang Daosheng made it clear that WorkBuddy has an open product architecture, allowing enterprise self-developed Agents, third-party Agents in the ecosystem and third-party IM to access. "The right to choose what model to use, what Agent to connect to, and what IM to adopt is entirely in the hands of enterprises."

At the model layer, Hunyuan Hy4 has been released recently. The official statement is that it enhances long-range tasks, improves the efficiency of chain of thought, and introduces visual understanding for the first time. But users can also call mainstream open-source models such as DeepSeek, GLM, MiniMax and Kimi as needed, with unified billing through the Token Plan.

There are no restrictions on IM either, and it is compatible with DingTalk and Lark. According to QuestMobile data, in China's collaborative office market, WeCom ranks second with a market share of 23.4%; DingTalk, which has about 200 million monthly active users, ranks first with a market share of 32.7%; Lark ranks third with a market share of about 18.9%.

In the mobile internet era, IM is an entry, representing the distribution right of users, usage duration and traffic. Therefore, the more closed the walled garden is, the wider the moat will be. But in the Agent era, the role of IM changes from a traffic gate to a task channel. The communication records and meeting consensus deposited on it are the context required by AI to understand the business, and also the assets that are the most difficult to replicate and transfer.

Closure cannot lock traffic, but will instead bring breakpoints when Agents perform tasks. Therefore, compatibility is not a gesture, but an inevitable choice. Tencent's positioning of WorkBuddy is not to replace the original tools and software, but to build a platform that can carry all tools, even an operating system for the Agent era.

But to truly connect the breakpoints and integrate into the actual work process, as Tang Daosheng said, to realize the transformation from "circulating around documents" to "collaborating around tasks", it is not only necessary to break through the barriers of tools and products and connect technical interfaces, but more importantly, to translate the inherent process system of enterprises into context understandable by Agents, and complete business implementation at the delivery level.

Therefore, in addition to internally integrating WeCom and Tencent's office ecosystem, and externally accessing the enterprise's own systems such as ERP and CRM through MCP and connectors to complete the "connection" at the product level, Tencent is also building an FDE service ecosystem, cooperating with service providers such as Anchuang, KPMG and ZanTong Technology, and plans to train 10,000 FDE industry implementation engineers in the next year.

FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) is a new profession that has risen rapidly in China in 2026. It requires practitioners to understand both customer business and implement technology into processes. Its essence is to help customers sort out "data structures and relations" and make the implicit rules of business explicit. Once FDE helps enterprises complete the "last mile" of delivery, the connection relations will be deposited on Tencent's platform.

Play strong cards in tough battles

In an era of excess models, what is scarce is not more powerful AI. The competition in the Agent era is a comprehensive competition of cloud, models, data, entries and delivery capabilities.

In this chain, cloud is the infrastructure, the gap between base models is narrowing, data is inflating, entries are converging, and only delivery is still in a tough battle. Delivery capability has become the decisive factor that determines the position of major manufacturers. As mentioned earlier, what determines the delivery result is whether the business context can be truly connected to the enterprise process, to the organization's permissions, knowledge and governance system, and transform platform capabilities into measurable productivity.

Li Qiang said, "Connection and openness are Tencent's unique advantages accumulated over more than 20 years." This is the "strongest" card in Tencent's hand. This time, Tencent wants to bring it into the real production environment of enterprises.

In the past few years, Tencent has not formed obvious advantages in the AI application layer. In the industry comprehensive rankings, Hunyuan is often placed in the second echelon. On the contrary, WorkBuddy, which was fully launched only in March this year, has become the first AI native product of Tencent to stand out.

According to QuestMobile's "2026 AI Platform Development Research Report", in July 2026, WorkBuddy PC end had 6.582 million monthly active users, with 19 times of usage per person per month. In July, Tencent merged another AI product QClaw into the WorkBuddy system, and the multi-line exploration of office Agents came to an end.

Shortly afterwards, Alibaba launched "Qianwen Office", which is integrated from three products QoderWork, Wukong and MuleRun; within one month, ByteDance successively brought the Lark product team, TRAE and Coze team into the Doubao system, and launched the independent brand "Doubao Work" in August. In the overseas market, Microsoft 365 Copilot released Copilot Cowork in June this year.

The competition on the office Agent track has just started. ByteDance's advantages lie in C-end traffic, the Doubao model and rapid organizational adaptability; DingTalk is backed by the process and management mindset of more than 26 million enterprise organizations; Microsoft Copilot relies on its high starting point and high stock of users, and its paid seats exceeded 30 million at the end of June this year, with the highest quarterly net increase since its release.

However, the connection that Tencent is best at is also an advantage that others find hard to replicate.

In an interview with the media, Tang Daosheng said that the commercialization of the WorkBuddy team should be "considered from the perspective of supporting the development of product services", taking into account the cost pressure and business models of third-party ecological partners.

In 2026, WorkBuddy has more than 2000 ecological partners, more than 60% of whom are cooperating with Tencent for the first time.

Under the framework of "Tencent builds the stage, partners perform", Tencent is extending the tentacles of connection to the bottommost production environments of all walks of life with the help of open platforms and ecosystems.

Conclusion

In the consumer internet era, the objects of connection are mainly people, and the value is reflected in user scale, activity and traffic distribution.

Entering the Agent era, the value of connection is changing. It no longer only allows people to find people and allows services to find users, but also allows Agents to understand enterprise knowledge, call business systems, follow organizational rules, and finally complete real work.

This is a more complex and longer project than connecting users. It requires the platform to have both technical capabilities and understanding of enterprise business; it needs to connect system interfaces, and also solve the problems of permissions, security, delivery and organizational collaboration.

Tencent is trying to turn this set of capabilities into a new ecosystem. WorkBuddy is the entry, Buddy One is the platform, and MCP and FDE extend to technical connection and business delivery respectively. In this system, Tencent provides the base and rules, and partners go deep into the industry to help it extend the connection relations to the capillaries of enterprise production.

Of course, connection does not equal productivity, and access does not mean real integration. How many core processes enterprises are willing to let Agents enter and how many key tasks they are willing to assign to Agents ultimately determines the value of this ecosystem.

Over the past two decades, Tencent has changed the way people use the internet through connection. The next round of competition will test whether it can change the way enterprises organize and use productivity through connection.

This is a card Tencent has held for many years. In the Agent era, it finally gets the chance to play this card in a deeper, more challenging and more worthwhile tough battle.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Snow Leopard Finance" (ID: xuebaocaijingshe), written by Li Xiao, and published by 36Kr with authorization.